Coalesce records on a normal value

Coalesce records on a normal value

Coalesce records on a normal value

Coalescence enables an administrator to redirect references to multiple records
containing variants of the same field value to point to a single record, based on a normal
value.

About this task

An example of this is the Company table that might have multiple variants of a
company name, such as Hewlett-Packard, Hewlett-Packard, Inc., Hewlett-Packard
Incorporated, HP, and so on. Potentially, thousands of records might reference each
of these duplicate company records. Using the variants of the Hewlett-Packard name
as aliases, coalescence unifies all these references into a single record that
normalizes the Name field in the Company record to a normal
value such as HP.

Note: Coalescing normal values
changes the record values permanently. If a rollback is performed, records will
be returned to the table, but the normalized values will not be rolled back to
the original variants.

Procedure

Navigate to Field Normalization > Configuration > Nrmalizations

Select a normalization record.

Enable Coalesce each normal.

The system adds the Coalesce to field to the
Normal Value form.

Create one or more normal value records for this normalization record.

Create related aliases and rules as needed.

For each normal value record, set Coalesce to by
selecting the record that contains the normal value.

For example, suppose your Company table contains several variations of the
name ServiceNow. When you
create the Normal Value record, you select the Company record for ServiceNow, Inc..
During normalization, the system updates any references to variant records to
instead refer to the normal record.

The system updates any references to records that match aliases and
rules to instead point to the normal record. The system also deletes the
duplicate records from the table.

Start all the
Alias application data jobs to replace the aliases
with the normal value in existing records in the database.